Blowing & Drifting

Today marks the end of my sixteenth month since starting work at Carleton. After a long holiday break, I've been terrifically busy with grantwriting. Between the first and thirty-first of January, my assistant and I worked on seven grant proposals with a combined value of more than $800,000. I think that's a good month's work, and of course we also did a considerable amount of other stuff: planning for upcoming submissions, follow-up work required by previously-awarded grants (such as more and less encyclopedic reports to funders), scanning endlessly the compendia of recently announced "requests for proposals." (It's no coincidence that I recently had a dream in which the letters "RFP" figured prominently and mysteriously.)

It's hard - even while walking around the frigid campus last week to get various muckety-mucks' signatures on a key form - to think anything about my work but, "What fools they are to pay me to do this!" It's not only satisfying to help bring in money for this professor or that program, but it's fascinating to learn about all the things the college is doing (from individual research projects all the way up to campus-wide initiatives); it's fun, in an idiosyncratically geeky way, to edit proposal materials (even the budgets!); and it's rewarding to see what I do at my desk turn magically into something very much like progress.

All that chocolately goodness was topped, a few weeks ago, with the powdered sugar of seeing a friend finally leave the company where I worked for him. He took e a far better job at a new company. He was, before being summarily reassigned back in 2005, the best boss I had at the Old Job: smart, industrious, cynical, dedicated to actually turning out "deliverables" that weren't embarrassing. No matter: the job and the company were such that hardly anyone (and certainly not me) could do anything but "fight fires" - try to resolve sudden problems that were the Most Important Thing right then. (Not for nothing was this guy our mascot).

Really, Carleton couldn't be more opposite in tone, pace, and attitude. Things move slowly and deliberately, leaving plenty of time (sometimes, maybe too much) to actually think about things. And I can actually do that thinking and talking and emailing in a setting where I trust that I'll be working with the same people for longer than the next two weeks. By the time I left the Old Job, in September 2005, I'd seen so much personnel churn that I could hardly bear to talk to many of my coworkers, since most were one job offer from leaving. (God knows I was.) Conversely, after being at Carleton for a year and a quarter, I'm still routinely the newest employee in any group, often by years. It's worth establishing good rapport and doing a good job because I'll probably be working with these people for years and years.

That's appealing in its own right, but it also indicates most Carleton employes' deep commitment  to the college and to the idea of liberal-arts education. And there's the last comparison: few people with any power at the Old Job really seemed committed to the idea of education except to make "education" a commodity that could be commodified and sold, preferably in exchange for federal student-loan funds that went back into the owners' pockets. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with exploiting a market, but that particular arrangement never rang true for me, or "incentivized" me to further that goal. Sixteen months after last facing that soul-sucking situation, I'm happy to not have to face it again.

Now if only there was a Coke machine in my building...

From the Swedish papers: the world's oldest continuously-operating newspaper is the Post och Inrikes Tidningar, founded in 1645 and serving since the seventeenth century as the official news organ of the Swedish government. The paper originated in a desire on the part of Queen Christina to show her subjects how she was spending their taxes. he paper, having long passed its heyday, is now switching from paper to internet publication.

One of the moms with whom Shannon convenes a regular toddler/baby playgroup arranged a little swim meet today for all the affiliated families and kids. I was happy to see both Julia and Genevieve go totally amphibian. Gigi - who looked like a little lump of swim-diapered Crisco - put her face in the water right away, and then spent a skin-wrinkling forty-five minutes kicking like a tadpole all around the pool (with Shannon holding on tight, of course). When I occasionally drifted by, she gave me one of those old-soul looks that babies can give, saying with her expressionless mouth and wide-open eyes, "What? I've spent more of my life submerged in fluid than I've been out of it, dude."

Julia - clad in a Sesame Street swimsuit - was less adventurous, but she remembered a good deal of last year's swimming lessons, and was happy to jump off the deck into my arms, to "kick and kick and kick" as I supported her chest and stomach, to be tossed and caught in a giant splash, to be pulled by the hands through the water, and to generally get soaked. I knew she was having a fantastic time when she started speaking with this crazy accent that common to natives of Funland: "I am hayayayving sohohohoh muyayayach fuyuyuyuyn!"

I'd rather not have a mouse wandering around our kitchen all night, especially given "his" habit of crapping everywhere, but I'm dismayed to find myself trying to kill him in some rather gruesome ways: glue traps, an updated version of the old neck-snapping spring trap, and, worst of all, some poison that contains bromethalin, a chemical which causes brain swelling, convulsions, paralysis, and death.

I put out the poison yesterday around this time. By 2:30 a.m. many had already been moved around (I checked then), so I'm guessing the mouse ate some of them overnight. Thinking of him convulsing to death in some cold crawlspace makes me feel bad, especially since he was so cute when he was outside, traipsing across the patio. Shannon even called him "Mousey Friend." Then he came in from the cold, and soon (I hope) he'll be dead.

The Otepää distance races were the last big test of classical-technique form before the marathons at the World Championships in early March.  The women's race was won decisively by Justyna Kowalczyk of Poland, who used her hunched-over style to post the fastest time at every check on her way to capturing her first World Cup win. Virpi Kuitunen (Finland, my pick to win) finished almost eight seconds back in second; Valentina Shevchenko (Ukraine) continued her recent run of good finishes by taking third. Norway's Marit Bjørgen took fourth, allowing Kuitunen to amass more points toward the World Cup overall and distance titles. Hometown favorite Kristina Smigun couldn't even break the top 20.

On the men's side, the story was much different, but the results no less demonstrative. Axel Teichmann "skied into the race" by posting the fastest split at only one place: the finish line. The German's furious finish put him ahead of two Norwegians who appeared to have the race sewn up: Frode Estil, who finished in second (6.7 seconds down), and Odd-Bjørn Hjelmeset, my pick to win but third by nearly 30 seconds. Teichmann's teammate Tobias Angerer was running in second with just 3000 meters to go, but faded badly and wound up in sixth, just behind Estonian Jaak Mae, whose fifth was the best national result on the day.

Sunday's sprints will be run over twisting racecourses with few straightaways and plenty of technical corners. My picks:

women's sprint

As a fan of both defunct ideologies and cold places, I'm thoroughly pleased to learn that the point in Antarctica which is furthest from the surrounding seas is called the "Pole of Inaccessibility" and that in 1958, a team of Soviet explorers left a bust of Lenin there, just sitting out in the snow.

Thanks to my dad's willingness to roadtrip with an infant, my sister Beth visited us earlier this week, and brought along her three-month-old daughter Rebecca. Sitting next to Genevieve (here on the left), I think you can see some family resemblance. Kiitos to whichever Finnish ancestor endowed us with our funny little baby noses.

My sister and dad also brought a truly angioplastic willingness to eat and eat and eat: on Monday and Tuesday, we had good square-sliced midwestern pizza (lunch), pasties they delivered from the U.P. (dinner), Northfield's finest sandwiches (lunch), and a (finally) quasi-Thanksgiving dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, etc. (parts of which we will finish off on Friday).  I think I might be hungry tomorrow for the first time since they left.

It was a very good, albeit too short, visit. Beth, Rebecca, and my brother-in-law Dan live in Holland - the country, not the city in Michigan - so it's all too rare that we can see them. They're leading interesting lives there, and raising a beautiful little girl. Thank goodness for Skype.

I hate our baby monitors. The dull roars they transmit will, I'm sure, drive me batty. We're using two monitors now, which is creating all kinds of wackiness. First, we can't have the two receivers too close to each other, lest they generate all kinds of horrifyingly loud interference. Most of the time, they sit on kitchen counters six feet apart. Second, Genevieve's newer transmitter apparently includes some sort of enslaving chip, as it will periodically begin broadcasting through both Gigi's receiver and Julia's, giving us an unnecessary stereo experience of all the noises Genevieve is making. Getting the two receivers to work appropriately entails a great deal of flicking the on-off and A/B channel switches - both of which are designed to foil my big, stupid fingers.

And then there's the nightly process of bringing Julia's transmitter upstairs with me when I go to bed. I can't just stick the thing in the outlet. First, I have to unplug both Genevieve's transmitter and the lamp, each of which cause feedback. Then I can plug in Julia's receiver and turn it on. If I'm lucky, I hear the hum of the white-noise machine in Julia's room, and I can go to bed. If I'm unlucky, something causes a buzz, and I have to carry the stupid receiver all around the darkened room, trying to find the sweet spot where there's no buzzing, whining, chirping, or other kind of electronic freakout.

Last night was a low point, though. Unplugging Julia's receiver, I stuck it in my pocket to head upstairs, but accidentally knocked the AC adapter plug out of its jack. I took the unit back out to plug the AC cord back in - only the jack itself had been dislodged from its mount and fallen into the body of the monitor. So at 12:04 a.m., I had to find a tiny-headed Phillips screwdriver, remove the screws holding the front and back halves of the body together, and then jimmy all the little circuit whatzits, electronic geegaws, and plastic thingamajobs into the right configuration. Not what I wanted to be doing at the witching hour. After ten minute's work, the reward was being able to hear that infernal hum.

Poor planning of my next 1-800 Contacts order has left me bereft of contact lenses right now, so for the past couple days I've been wearing my glasses all the time.

This thrills Julia, who looks forward to the moments each day when Mama and Daddy put their "gwasses" on. In a "it's always junior high" kind of way, it's also caused considerable interest at work. At least a half-dozen people with whom I work regularly have commented (several, a number of times) on my "new" glasses. Though these coworkers are mostly complimentary (Shannon did an excellent job picking out good frames last time I had to get new specs), they also seem surprised when I tell them that I usually wear contacts, have been wearing glasses since the fourth grade, et cetera.

Part of me wants to go into a good fake rant about "What, can't a guy be half-blind and deaf? You frigging able-bodied people sicken me," but then I decide against it.

As Saturday's post indicated, it was a pretty fun weekend here. I was excited to see the snow falling and falling today; perhaps I'll be able to get on my skis after all. All day, Julia looked outside and said, "My goodness, it's a pwetty snowy day, Daddy!" If time permits next week - we're going to be visited by my dad, my sister Beth, and her new daughter Rebecca! - I'm going to try to put up some recently recorded video and audio clips of the two girls.

Julia and her friend Lucy went sledding today. They had fun (and, later, their first cups of hot cocoa).

The cross-country World Cup resumes this weekend with racing in Rybinsk, Russia, 280 kilometers northeast of Moscow but just a stone's throw from the Volga. Low snow forced the event organizers to alter the schedule twice: once by picking up the individual freestyle sprints which had been lost when pre-Christmas races in Italy were canceled, then again by swapping distance mass-start races for the originally-planned pursuits.

Given the lack of snow, the freestyle distance events on Saturday will be run on a short 2.5km loop, lending a track-meet flavor to the racing: the women will do six laps of the 2.5 km loop, the men, a whopping twelve laps. Dizziness may ensue, especially among the Russian racers who should still be riding their strong individual and team performances at the Tour de Ski and looking to perform well in the first World Cup race in Russia since 2003. The loop includes a tough thousand-meter section with three tightly nested hairpins that climb and descend a considerable slope - perfect for crashes and breakaways.

The chance of a dominant performance by the home teams is heightened by the fact that both distance races have very small fields: only 28 women will contest the 15km race, only 36 men will race the 30km. (The fields were twice as big for identical races run at La Clusaz, France, before Christmas.) Several notable teams - including Sweden and Norway - are completely skipping Rybinsk. Norway is staging its national championships right now, so its skiers are naturally racing there for spots on the world championship team; other racers are competing at the Winter Universiade (a sort of junior Olympics, this year being held in Torino in last year's Olympic venues), or simply extending the long break after the end of the Tour de Ski. Those caveats aside, here are my picks for the distance races. (On Saturday, after seeing the start lists for Sunday's freestyle sprints, I'll make my picks for those races.)

Women's 15km F mass start

1) Katerina Neumannova, 2) Virpi Kuitunen, 3) Kristina Smigun

Men's 30km F mass start

1) Evgenji Dementiev, 2) Sergej Shiriaev, 3) Tobias Angerer

I just finished Phase II of our anti-mouse campaign. Phase I, launched yesterday, consisted of two kinds of traps placed in the closet where Shannon saw the invader. As I put the traps in place, I saw him, too, clambering around a box fan. It was a manly shriek I shrieked. Mouse 1, Human 0.

Though today Shannon saw a mouse outside, traipsing across the patio, both traps were untouched this evening (Mouse 2, Human 0). So tonight I jammed some heavy-gauge steel wool in three substantial gaps along the floorboards in the closet. (The steel wool cut my hands up quite nicely: Mouse 3, Human 0). Two of those holes are along our townhouse's common wall, which runs perpendicularly to the exterior wall and features two shoddily-installed faucets - perfect entry points for Mr. Mouse.

On Monday, I had to go back to my audiologist to have her look at my right hearing aid, which I discovered one day to be missing a tiny "wax guard" designed to keep you-know-what from getting inside the device. There was a chance that the wax guard had come loose while I was wearing the aid, and that it was now rattling around inside my ear. I half expected to sneeze it out.

Anyhow, it turned out that the audiologist couldn't fix the aid (or the wax guard), so she had to send it back to the manufacturer. Since then, I've been walking around wearing only the left aid, and the effect is disconcerting. Not only do all sounds now seem to be coming (very loudly and harshly) from the left, but the right ear is up to its bad old trick of ringing constantly.

And having only one aid in, after nearly eight months of wearing them both at every waking moment, has really messed with my balance and prioperception. My head is perpetually cocked to the right, I have to take extra care in making even the slightest turn in either direction, and my hands are continually either knocking things over or failing to get a really good grip on them.

Getting old stinks.

Having been quite obsessed with him when I was a kid, I'm happy that Richard Scarry is a new favorite of Julia's. In the past few days, we've probably read the section of What Do People Do All Day? entitled "A Visit to the Hospital" at least fifty times. I wish it was more: it's enormously fun to study the pictures - which are, as this biography of Scarry states, "dense with slapstick and visual humor" - as I read the story of Abby's tonsillectomy. (Here's an interesting collection of photos showing contrasts between 1963 and 1991 versions of The Best Word Book Ever.)

And of course, Julia has used this chapter as the platform for hours of play in which she is Abby, the bunny, and I'm Doctor Lion and Mama is Doctor Lion too or maybe she's Nurse Nelly and we have to take out Julia/Abby's tonsils and then let her rest in bed while she eats "schockolit" ice cream. It's great fun. If only we could get on to the chapters about making bread and delivering mail. And how am I going to correct myself after days of pronouncing his surname "scar-ee," when in fact it is apparently "scary"?

Who cares. It's enough to share a few minutes every day with Julia and a man who worked like this: "He didn't write stories, he drew them in pencil on frosted acetate. Then he painted through the entire stack color by color. First he'd colorize everything meant to be red, then blue, yellow, and so forth. He'd do all the pigs, then all the cats, then all the dogs."